brief recap

this week has been kinda stressful/unpredictable/totally typical of life. needless to say, as i sit in my class learning about complementary and alternative medicines, i'm taking a mind vacation back to my best weekend ever with my cousin to restore my equilibrium.

twins

animal sightings!!

(but let's forget some)

everyone is on the porch at scout's house. yes please.

we're women. we cook. we use placemats. but only placemats with monkeys.

pumpkins and ice-pops. welcome-to-richmond halloween.

alissa, i'm so glad i have you in my life. i love who you are as a woman and i'm so proud of you. amen amen amen amen

curious combination

where can i get a pair of these shoes?

oh snap

i woke up this morning after an AMAZING weekend with my cousin feeling worn out and not ready to face the week. staggered into work looking like this:

drank so much coffee my stomach hurt for the next 5 hours.

had to come home and study for my test tomorrow.

basically, life sucks without alissa.

so happy

last night i was in a boat on the river, chilling with 5 amazing friends, looking at the city i love illuminated by lights.




i am too too lucky.

ALISSA IS COMING! ALISSA IS COMING!

50% reunion begins FRIDAY. can't hardly wait. here are some activities i have planned:
1. warm naps
2. river when sunny
3. walk-abouts
4. cooking delicious food
5. sewing machine creations
6. socialization with peers
7. numerous video chats with mutual loved ones
8. exploring on bikes
9. late night talks
10. matching tattoos?

so so so so so so so excited.

terrific tuesday

let's get happy

don't give me that look

my patients on monday were full of spirit. i came back to see this elderly couple - she hasn't been controlling her blood sugars well. she's a diabetic. all she's been eating is fruit. only fruit. now in my world, this would cause my preceptor to go "LORD, CHILD! What is this woman doing to herself?!?" in my world, what is happening to her body is a big deal. i try to talk with her about what is going on. she says she is GOING to eat fruit.

keep it up.

a lot of times too i think people just don't know things so i always try to educate. when i am in a bad mood, this may come across as fear tactics. i'm basically like:
listen lady, don't you know you can't play around with your blood sugars. diabetes causes blindness, kidney failure, and amputations.... she just keeps saying, "SO?!? SO?!?!"


why am i in healthcare again?

festival of india

rocking my new silk scarf.

glorious genome

this is the:

"highest-resolution picture ever of the genome’s three-dimensional structure.

The picture is one of mind-blowing fractal glory, and the technique could help scientists investigate how the very shape of the genome, and not just its DNA content, affects human development and disease.

For decades, some cell biologists suspected that the genome’s compression wasn’t just an efficient storage mechanism, but linked to the very function and interaction of its genes.

In mathematical terms, the pieces of the genome are folded into something similar to a Hilbert curve, one of a family of shapes that can fill a two-dimensional space without ever overlapping — and then do the same trick in three dimensions. How evolution arrived at this solution to the challenge of genome storage is unknown. It might be an intrinsic property of chromatin, the DNA-and-protein mix from which chromosomes are made.

“How much variation is there in structure across cell types? What controls it? Exactly how important is it? We don’t know,” said Dekker. “This is a new area of science.”

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." — Paul Bowles

sometimes i forget how finite it all is too. good thing love never ends.

sneak peek

for alissa:

weekend adventures

i just uploaded all my pictures so i want to share them, which is why i keep posting photos, photos, photos. one day i woke up and it was so so pretty - fall is being glorious this 2009. i wanted to play outside with a puppy but i didn't have one so i made a few calls. then, dog and friend in hand we walked to a hidden park near my house. in this picture one silly tree has decided it is already well into fall:

scout is being dora the explorer in the park.


changing leaves: just the tip, just to see how it feels

meet james

i discovered a whole other side to the river thanks to a new purchase by some of my rockstar friends.
thanks guys! oh hey richmond.

hell yeah, i'm 28

the day was a lot of magic.






i am so so lucky.

other events on the deck

i spend a lot of time baking because putting ingredients together and making something homemade makes me really happy. however, it is not really that do-able for me to set aside time for baking. instead i try to make it occur as i live my normal life. this results in a lot of mistakes and frequent burns. but it makes me really happy. one day i totally forgot about the cookies in the oven and they ended up burned to a crisp, the kind of burned where they will smell the whole house up if you don't take them outside. so i took them and put them on the screened-in back porch. the next day we look out the window and find
do you see that guilty squirrel eating my burned cookie!?! it didn't even bother climbing away from the porch, it just chilled there feasting like it was no biggie. a photo shoot commenced since this was unbelievable. welcome to the fun house.

thunder storm summer

this was my first summer in a long time that there were storms every afternoon. the air was so full of moisture. i spent a lot of august

watching


the



rain

amen amen amen amen amen